Israel has been joined by Saudi Arabia openly and Turkey covertly, in opposing the rehabilitation of Iran. Here is what is What I wrote about. A shorter verion appeared in The Indian Express.

“The euphoria that spread though the world after the Iran – EU nuclear agreement is proving short-lived. Republicans in the US Congress have made it clear that they will spare no effort to block it. Hilary Clinton, the democratic Presidential hopeful, is keeping her options open. Whispers are escaping from European chancelleries that the sanctions on Iran will only be lifted in stages. Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani have responded by insisting that they must be lifted ‘at once’.

But the agreement’s most inveterate enemy is Binyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. In the week that followed the Lausanne agreement he warned the American public in three successive speeches that it would threaten the survival of Israel and increase the risk of ‘a horrific war’. This is a brazen attempt to whip up fear and war hysteria on the basis of a spider’s web of misinformation.

Netanyahu unveiled the first at the UN General Assembly in 2012. It was a large cartoon of a bomb with a red line across it, just below the mouth. This was how close Iran was to making a nuclear bomb, he said. It could get there in a year. Only much later did the world learn that Mossad, his own intelligence service, had told him that Iran was very far from being able to build a bomb.

Mossad probably knew what a US Congress Research Service report revealed two months later: that although Iran already had enough 5 percent, or low-enriched, Uranium in August 2012 to build 5 to 7 bombs, it had not enriched enough of it to the intermediate level of 20 percent to meet the requirement for even one bomb. The CRS had concluded from this and other evidence that this was because Iran had made no effort to revive its nuclear weapons programme after stopping it ‘abruptly’ in 2003.

Netanyahu’s second deception is that he only wants to punish Iran with sanctions till it gives up trying to acquire not only nuclear weapons but any nuclear technology that could even remotely facilitate this in the future. But he knows that no government in Iran can agree to this. So what he is really trying to steer the world towards is the alternative– a military attack on Iran.

What is more, since he also knows that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will not destroy its capacity to rebuild these in the future he does not want the strike to end till it has destroyed Iran’s infrastructure ( as Israel destroyed Southern Lebanon’s in 2006) , its industry, its research facilities and its science universities.

He knows that Israel cannot undertake such a vast operation without the Americans. But there is one stumbling block—Barak Obama, who has learned from his recent experience that, to put it mildly, America’s interests do not always tally with those of its allies in the middle east. So Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the US Congress to insert clauses in the Treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the west into an attack on Iran.

He has been joined in this endeavour by another steadfast friend of the US, Saudi Arabia. At the end of February Saudi Arabia quietly signed an agreement with Israel that will allow its warplanes to overfly Saudi Arabia on their way to bombing Iran. This has halved the distance they will need to fly. And less than four weeks later, on March 26, it declared war on the Houthis in Yemen, whom it has been relentlessly portraying as a tiny minority bent upon taking Yemen over through sheer terror, with the backing of Iran.

This is a substantial oversimplification , and therefore distortion, of a complicated relationship. Iran may well be helping the Houthis, but not because they are Shias. The Houthis, who make up 30 percent of Yemen’s population, are Zaidis, a very different branch of Shi’a-ism than the one practiced in Iran, Pakistan and India. They inhabit a region that stretches across Saada, the northernmost district of Yemen, and three adjoining principalities, Jizan, Najran, and Asir, that Saudi Arabia annexed in 1934. The internecine wars that Yemeni Houthis have fought since the 1960s have not been sectarian, or even against the Saudis specifically, but in quest of independence and, more recently, a federal state. This is a goal that several other tribes share.

The timing of Saudi Arabia’s attack, four weeks after its overflight agreement with Israel, and its incessant portrayal of the Houthis as proxies of Iran, hints at a deeper understanding between it and Israel. The Houthis’ attacked Sana’a, the capital, last September. So why did Saudi Arabia wait till now before sending its bombers in?

Iran has kept out of the conflict in Yemen so far, but the manifestly one-sided resolution passed by the UN Security Council, the immediate resignation of the UN special envoy for Yemen Jamal Benomar, who had been struggling to bring about a non-sectarian resolution of the conflict in Yemen and been boycotted by Saleh’s successor, Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi for his pains, cannot have failed to raise misgivings in Teheran. Iraqi President Haydar Abadi’s sharp criticism of the Saudi attack in Washington on the same day reflects his awareness of how these developments are darkening the prospect for Iran’s rehabilitation, and therefore Iraq’s future.

To stop this drift Obama needs to tell his people precisely how far, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s interests have diverged from those of the US, and how single-mindedly Israel has used its special relationship with the US to push it into actions that have imperiled its own security in the middle east.

Instead of dwelling on how the treaty will make it close-to-impossible for Iran to clandestinely enrich uranium or produce plutonium, he needs to remind Americans of what Netanyahu has been carefully neglecting to mention: that a nuclear device is not a bomb, and that to convert it into one Iran will need not only to master the physics of bomb-making and reduce its weight to what a missile can carry but carry out at least one test explosion to make sure the bomb works. That will make escaping detection pretty well impossible.

Lastly the White house needs to remind Americans that Iranians also know the price they will pay if they are caught trying to build a bomb after signing the agreement. Not only will this bring back all and more of the sanctions they are under, but it will vindicate Netanyahu’s apocalyptic predictions and make a pre-emptive military strike virtually unavoidable.

Finally, should a military strike, whether deserved or undeserved, destroy Iran’s economy, it will add tens of thousands of Shi’a Jihadis to the Sunni Jihadis already spawned in Libya, Somalia, Chechnya and the other failed states and regions of the world. The security that Netanyahu claims it will bring, will turn out to be a chimera.

A hundred years after it began the American century is drawing to a close. It began in the closing stages of the First World War, when the exhausted allies turned to the Americans for the final, decisive, push to defeat Germany. It is ending with the Obama administration’s increasingly obvious inability to stop the growth of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. What is coming to an end is not America’s military pre-eminence in the world: no country can even think of waging war against it. What is ending is American hegemony.

Hegemony needs to be distinguished from dominance. Gramsci described it as “the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations”. In international relations a dominant country enjoys hegemony when it can claim, successfully, that what it is doing in its own interest also serves the general interest. This is the perception of America that is dying in a welter of mutual recrimination.

Momentous changes sometimes reveal themselves in small, even trivial, events. One such occurred on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN programme ‘GPS’, on Sunday October 12. The subject was the imminent fall of Kobani, the capital city of Syrian Kurdistan, to ISIS. While interviewing Barham Salih, former prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan and deputy prime minister of Iraq, Zakaria asked him whether the Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga, would be prepared to go into central Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS . Salih’s response was carefully weighed: “Kurdistan has emerged as the most reliable partner of the coalition in the fight against ISIS. There may be a number of reasons. One that I am proud of is that Kurdistan is a tolerant society with tolerant values. We do have a real interest in taking on ISIS. … but I have to say that the Peshmerga should not be relied upon to go to Mosul or the heartland of the sunni areas. We can be there to support, but at the same time the communities there have to be empowered. The same thing can be said about Syria….” I did not hear the rest of the sentence because at this point Zakaria cut him off.

Zakaria may have done so unintentionally, but in the fifteen-minute panel discussion that followed, all the participants, Francis Fukuyama, Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs, Daniele Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Walter Mead , professor at Bard college and columnist in The American Interest, also avoided mentioning Syria. Nor did they mention Iran.

Their reticence was strange. Cooperation with Syria has been an option on Obama’s table since day one: in fact the intelligence agencies began exchanging information in June itself. In August, after Iran backed the new Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi, several members of his administration advocated cooperating with Iran, which would have meant with Syria too. Mead devoted an entire column in the American Interest to discussing its pros and cons. So why, two months later, did Pletka, Rose, and even Fukuyama, criticise Obama for promising too much, and implicitly advocate withdrawal from the region in preference to cooperating with Syria and Iran?

The answer is that cooperating with Syria now will be an admission that the US made a colossal mistake in joining the conspiracy to oust Bashar–al-Assad three years ago. Given that this would not be its first but second huge mistake in the middle east, and given their incalculable cost, it would destroy what is left of America’s moral authority in the world.

That is why it has become so necessary for the US to keep insisting that Assad must go if peace is to be restored in Syria; to pretend in the face of all evidence to the contrary that, hidden under the Salafi jihad for the establishment of an extreme theocratic state, there really is a moderate sunni freedom movement that wants to bring in democracy; and that its sunni allies – Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are really good guys who were paying and arming these fighters in good faith, and are now eager to rectify their mistake.

In reality – and this is the true measure of how deeply American hegemony has been eroded – 62 countries have supposedly joined the US coalition against ISIS, but their contribution so far has been laughable. Saudi Arabia has 340 aircraft but has contributed four fighter jets to the aerial campaign against ISIS. Qatar has contributed two. Turkey has so far only allowed NATO to use its bases. Its tanks and troops are drawn up on the heights a mere 800 metres from Kobani, watching the battle while its government presses the US to create a no fly zone to prevent Syria’s air force from going to the Kurds’ rescue, and demands a commitment to oust Assad as a precondition for sending soldiers to join the battle.

Israel has played a key role in nurturing ISIS: it was an offshoot of AIPAC, its powerful lobby in the US, that introduced Abu Bakr al Baghdadi to Senator John McCain during his four hour visit to Syria last year. In June prime minister Netanyahu went on American television to warn Obama against cooperating with Syria and Iran, because ISIS’ defeat would allow a nuclear-capable Iran to emerge as the pre-eminent power in the region.

Obama has succumbed to all these pressures. As a result he has been left with a ‘grand strategy’ that is doomed to fail. If he wishes to cut America’s losses he would do well to ask himself a few questions: From Pakistan to Indonesia why has not a single Muslim country joined the fight against ISIS ? Why has India not offered help? Why are Kurds in four countries, who are overwhelmingly Sunnis, willing to fight ISIS to the death? And why are so few moderate Sunnis in Syria willing to join the fight against Assad?

The answer to all these questions is the same: This is not a battle between Sunni good guys and Shia devils, but an attempt by a tiny Wahhaby-Salafi fringe of Islam to take over the entire Muslim world, and the Americans are on the wrong side. It is America’s so-called friends that are digging the grave of American hegemony.

I am writing to ask Americans whether they have no sense of shame left.

If they do how can they tolerate a government like Obama’s which, despite the public beheading of two american journalists and two more western hostages whose only crime was a desire to help ordinary people in a remote part of the world who were in distress, has deliberately chosen not to attack ISIS when and where it is most vulnerable, and instead preferred to lie to his own people about his government’s true intentions towards ISIS and the larger middle east.

I speak out of agony, not just for the thousands of Kurds who will soon meet their ISIS executioners, but also for America. I am seventy five, and belong to a post-war generation for whom respect, even reverence for America was axiomatic. This survived Vietnam, and only began to erode in 2003. Today I wish I could switch off my feelings and allow the US to destroy itself, but I can’t. So I take tranquillisers and use the only voice I have to try and reach others, especially in the US, who may care about the future of their country and the world.

On September 11, Obama promised to destroy ISIS. There followed a flurry of much publicised attacks on what turned out to be mostly vacant buildings in Raqqa, far from the battle zone. In the meantime ISIS invaded Kurdish Syria and surrounded its principal city, Kubane. Yesterday it captured three eastern districts of Kubane, the main city of Syrian Kurdistan. Kurds are continuing to fight from street to street, but it is now only a matter of time before they are driven outor killed. Then it will be the turn of the civians. Before it entered Kubane, ISIS was out in the fields around it, pounding the city with tank and artillery fire, to which the Kurds had no reply. A handful of US air attacks would have destroyed their tanks and guns. But the US did not send a single plane to destroy them.

The Kurds begged and begged, but were met with a stony silence. And it was not only from the Amercians. On the slopes above Kubane are lined up dozens of Turkish Tanks, and thousands of soldiers watching the inexorable end approach. These are Europe and the USA’s NATO partners. Turkey is also the US’ main ally in the ‘Grand Alliance’ against ISIS. The Kurds have been entreating the Turks too to rescue them. The serried ranks of tanks I saw on the hillside convince me that Turkey could wipe out the ISIS around Kubane in hours. But this great ally of the christian, secular, democratic, West has not only not gone to Kubane’s rescue but demanded air cover for ISIS against Syrian warplanes and a public assurance from the US that it shall remove Assad from power in Syria as a reward for sending its troops in.

What worries me is that Obama is indecisive and gullible enough to believe the Turks. In actual fact , were he to agree Turkey will send in its tanks and ISIS will beat a hasty, pre-arranged, retreat. Turkey will then carry on towards Damascus claiming that it is pursuing ISIS remnants, and when Syria is forced to oppose it, will unleash all of its military power on Syria.

In fact, as you may have guessed, I don’t think Obama is either indecisive or gullible. This was always the real plan behind the mock ‘Plan’ that he unveiled on August 22 and September 11. And, like it, this one too will fail. It will fail because I cannot see Russia not supporting Assad, and I cannot see Iran not sending its army through Iraq (with the governments full covert support) to Syria. Turkey and the West will also find out that Syrians by and large continue to back Assad because he has held a referendum and an election and because he is fighting to save Syria’s secularism. Turkey will face not only ISIS but guerrilla attacks from Syrians too.

And it will fail because ISIS will continue to feed upon the successes that the west is feeding to it. Only two days ago the Tehreek-e-Taliban, the most feared fighters in Pakistan, announced that they were joining Al Qaeda. Since Al Qaeda has now linked up with ISIS, they have in effect joined ISIS. The TTP’s decision will influence others – not least of all in India and Bangladesh. Where does the US think this will end? How long will the graveyard that it is helping to turn the world into take to swallow it too ?

Many people have warned against an attack on Syria because it could ignite a sectarian bloodbath in the entire middle east. But I have seen no exhaustive analysis of precisely what could happen. In the paragraphs that follow I have tried to follow the logic of current developments to their logical conclusion and see where it leads. Comments will be welcome.

On Thursday September 5 the Daily Telegraph of London carried the headline “Obama will strike Syria to end war”. Only the heartlessly cynical could make such a statement; only the hopelessly naive will believe it. For the strike on Syria will be not be the end of war but a beginning. What it will end is the Syrian government’s capacity to stave off the waves of al Qaeda linked Jihadis who are flooding into Syria through Turkey from over 40 countries. And it will be the beginning of a larger civil war that will plunge the entire eastern Mediterranean littoral into a sectarian holocaust.

The Syrian people are fully aware of this: in Damascus they are mobilising for war: young men are acquiring arms; tailors are working night and day to sew uniforms for them; and families are stockpiling food and water for the grim days that lie ahead. Christians and Alawis who can afford to, are sending their families to Lebanon. “After the Americans finish bombing the Jihadis will come”, said one young man to BBC as he waved his pro-Assad wristband in front of the camera lens. We will be waiting for them. I am prepared to die for my country.”

Shias are mobilising in neighbouring Iraq. “This is Iraq 2003 all over again”, an Iraqi told the Guardian. “We will not leave our Syrian brethren to fight alone”. In Lebanon the Hezbollah is geared for battle. Its cadres have decimated fleeing Jihadis who have sought shelter in Lebanon. Today they are preparing to flood into Syria with the full backing of the bulk of the Lebanese population.

Syria’s Kurds are also being drawn into the war. Fazel Hawramy, an independent journalist from Iraqi Kurdistan reported in his blog on August 28 that about 70 Kurds belonging to the Al Qaeda linked Ansar-ul-Islam, had joined the Jabhat al Nusra and were fighting Kurds belonging to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria. The Syrian Kurds therefore already know that Al Qaeda has no intention of respecting their autonomy. This suggests that the wider war that the bombings will unleash is likely to engulf Syrian Kurdistan as well. Lastly since the PYD is the Syrian affiliate of the powerful Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, the fighting can spread not only to sections of Turkey’s 22 million Alawites but to its 11 million Kurds as well.

Obama’s administration cannot be unaware of these dangers, but believes that it will be able to extract a win-win result for itself and its principal ally, Israel. A strong but limited missile strike on Syria, it believes, will weaken the Assad regime without giving the Jihadis an outright victory. The prolonged civil war that will follow will eliminate most of the Jihadis, weaken the Hezbollah and bleed Syria into impotence, leaving Israel the undisputed master of the eastern Mediterranean. It will also send an unambiguous signal to Iran on what will happen to it if it pursues its nuclear weapons programme.

The arrogance that underlies these calculations is breathtaking: indeed this is power gone berserk for it presupposes a capacity to control the outcome of war that, history has shown, does not exist. How can Obama and his planners be so confident that their air-cum-missile strike will draw no response from the Syrian armed forces? How can they be so sure that it will be ineffective? Iraq’s response was ineffective because 12 years of sanctions had left its armed forces without aircraft, guns, ammunition, and missiles. Libya’s was ineffective because the country was tiny, militarily isolated and taken by surprise.

Syria, by contrast has had days of warning. It has a battle hardened army, an array of sophisticated Russian missiles including an upgraded version of the Yakhont anti-ship missile and, just possibly, a few operational batteries of the S-300. What is more, unlike Libya, it will not be cyber-blind. Seven Russian warships are stationed along the Syrian coast, ready to feed it real time information on American ship movements and missile launches.

Can Obama be sure that Syria will not succeed in sinking a single American ship or bringing down a single aircraft? And if it does, how will a President who feels too politically weak to disregard taunts about his inability to enforce an imaginary ‘red line’, face the taunts that will be hurled at him when American soldiers are killed and ships or aircraft destroyed ?

Can he be sure that Iran will not join in the battle; that Baghdad will not give safe passage to Iranian and Iraqi fighters, and Russians will not send ships loaded with S-300 and other deadly missiles to Syria, daring the US to stop them?

To forecast what is likely to happen in Syria one needs to look not at Iraq or Libya but Kosovo . When NATO first drew up plans for bombing Yugoslav forces in Kosovo it had expected to use 40 aircraft and bomb Kosovo for two weeks. But when its supposedly deadly precision bombing damaged or destroyed no more than 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s guns and armour in Kosovo the NATO commander General Wesley Clarke was compelled to seek permission to widen his attack. As a result by mid-April, 1999, three weeks after the bombing began, NATO had committed 1000 aircraft to a non-stop bombing of Kosovo and the rest of Serbia.

In the next fifty days, NATO bombers flew nearly 6,000 bombing missions, dropped 20,000 bombs, knocked out half of Serbia and Montenegro’s airports, all of their oil refining capacity, 31 bridges (including all but two over the Danube), seventy percent of its power supply, two railway systems that linked Serbia to Kosovo, and most of its telecommunications system. By early May 1999 these raids had already killed 1200 civilians and seriously injured another 5,000. The total number of bombs dropped exceeded those dropped on Iraq during the 1991 gulf war. The result: an independent Kosovo —a semi criminal state whose revenues are derived largely from the trans-shipment of narcotics from Asia to Europe.

The longer that Obama bombs Syria, the more certain will a Jihadi victory become. This will upset the US and Israel’s calculations and become the starting point of a much more intense terrorist war that will engulf Jordan, Egypt and, ultimately Israel itself. The precedent for understanding this is Afghanistan 1991. Between 1980 and 1991 around 16,000 Arab Mujahideen graduated from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri’s Beit al Maqtab. After the Russians withdrew, some 2,800 to 3,000 remained behind in Pakistan and around ten thousand headed for home. Within months these plunged Egypt, Libya, and Algeria into civil wars that have still not ended. Many of them , however, became the first mercenaries in the new global army of Islam and headed for Bosnia and Chechnya.

A Jihadi victory in Syria willleave 10,000 to 15,000 foreign jihadis ( John Kerry’s estimate) unemployed penniless and unwanted. With shattered economies and little chance of finding a job at home few will wish, or be allowed, to return to their home countries. Their only option will be to find another holy war to fight. As Osman, a Kurdish member of Jabhat al Nusra, wrote to his brother in Halabja shortly before his death, “Once the fight is over here [in Syria], we will go anywhere the kuffar are fighting against Muslims.”

Al Qaeda and its numerous affiliates, like the Hizbut Tahrir, have never made any secret of their ultimate goal, which is to liberate Al Quds (Jerusalem) and the Al Aqsa mosque. This requires the destruction of Israel. The easiest way to Israel lies through Jordan and the Sinai. So these Islamist mercenaries will target the strongly pro-west half-British monarchy in Jordan and the tottering, army-backed, secular regime in Egypt. In both countries the influx of several thousand battle-hardened fighters who are willing to die for Islam will tilt the scales against the survival of the government.

Obama’s intervention will not therefore ‘end the war in Syria’ but ignite a far larger bloodbath. The death toll will not be counted in thousands but millions. And when it ends there is a more than even chance that the entire region will be under Al Qaeda’s sway. Should this happen Israel’s survival will become doubtful, for it will be surrounded. Its hostile borders will be ten times longer and will therefore become well-nigh indefensible. Iran will then be the least of its worries.

About

Hi, my name is Prem Shankar Jha. I am a journalist and author based in New Delhi, India.
In the last decade I have become more and more concerned about where the world is heading and I am curious to explore interactive formats with you in order to share views and concerns.
Please do not hesitate to be in touch.